Gook splat. Gook gunk. Ankle deep. Blood seeping through his shoes. Try it on she said. Try it on she laughed. That gook kid. Gook dead. Blood seeping. Ankle deep.
American Tabloid is great. The Black Dahlia is very good. But all his novels are pretty much the same aren’t they? Stacccato. Sentences. Tight. Claustrophobic. No fluidity. Little grace.
Characters like his sentences don’t really evolve. Don’t grow. Have shade or nuance or subtlety. The men are all venal and corrupt and weak in ways various. All the women are tarts with hearts. Or good girls gone bad. They like their men tough and their sex rough. Then they die. At the hands of weak, venal, corrupt men. The cast of thousands becomes impossible to follow. Especially as they are all so similarly drawn. The hundreds of pages difficult to read. As it’s not writing. It’s typing. Page after page. Same shit. Over and over. I bought Perfidia, started to read it. Gave up. Page 162. I’m gonna try again. Some time. I know I will.
So is Ellroy any good? I sort of want to think he is. But is it boy music? Do we like Ellroy, the same way we like the Dan. The darkness, the difficulty, the misogyny, the misanthropy?
So? Is he? Any good?
Yes, of course he’s good. But I don’t enjoy his work as much as I enjoy many others in the same genre, for the reasons you give. He’s very hard to like, and in the end, the effort becomes grudging.
I’m currently reading John Sandford’s “Prey” series; extremely entertaining police procedurals which somehow slipped under my net for many years.
Hmmmm. “Grudging” is right. But I get “grudging” from Greene, and he *is* good.
Cripes yes. Greene is in a different league. The US don’t have an equivalent.
Worked my way through Ellroy, one book every couple of years.
No complaints, you know what you’re getting every time.
Maybe he’s the noir Mark E Smith.
Oh yes, avoid My Dark Places. There’s sharing and then there’s just plain unreadable.
I’m reading Perfidia at the moment (p205). It’s the first Ellroy I’ve read and I’m enjoying it a lot. I was struck on reading this by how much David Peace is obviously influenced by him…
The sentences have got shorter over the years. Good spot with David Peace.
Sometimes. Some of the books can be hard going,White Jazz anyone? Can’t seem to get into Bloods A Rover either.
The Black Dahlia and L.A Confidential are superb.
the noir Mark E Smith. is a great desciption,Fedoraboy.
Oi. We don’t like the Dan, you do. I think the Dan are horrible.
I do like Ellroy’s the LA Quartet very much though, but couldn’t get into anything post American Tabloid. I’ll probably give Perfidia a go.
I also liked Peace’s Red Riding Quartet a lot. Definitely an Ellroy influence there but with dark occult undertones.
Give Peace a chance. I did. The Damned United was good. GB84 unreadable. Pale Yorkshire Ellroy (TMTL).
As for that Arsenal/Liverpool thing. Words fail me. As clearly they did him.
Didn’t Ellory say that the whole staccato sentence thing reached a peak with The Cold Six Thousand and that he would change his prose style after that? I enjoyed The Black Dahlia, Big Nowhere and American Tabloid, but I’m not an avid reader of his books. He’s good, but I can take or leave him.
Ellroy isn’t any good, he’s fantastic at his best.
He’s produced at least half a dozen classics & has always had no problem illuminating the putrid heart of the American psyche – in fact he’s likely taken an unseemly relish in doing so.
I’d see an analogy more the Stooges than with the Dan ( & I’m a fan of both).
The Stooges are not for everyone & I don’t care for them everyday, but once in a while it does me the power of good to be reminded of their brutal force which as Rollins put it ‘ leaves most of your music collection cowering with its tail between its legs’ – Ellroy does the same for me book-wise – a full frontal assault that yields cathartic results.
Most of my historical background knowledge on LA comes from Ellroy & Walter Mosely who I think complement each other brilliantly.
I came to Ellroy via the movie LA Confidential. I then read the LA quartet which are vivid brutal and thoroughly entertaining period crime novels. I also enjoyed American Tabloid which signalled a move into more political, organised crime territory. I only got into the Cold Six Thousand at a second attempt as I too found the staccato prose slightly off-putting. Bloods a Rover is on the shelf as yet untouched.
He’s easily the most accomplished American crime novelist. His books are not simply police procedural, forensic who-dunnits involving a central crime busting hero kind of character, but complex multi plotted, and multi character, tales about the dark underbelly of American life in the mid 20th century.
Wheldrake is correct. The short staccato sentences are limited to The Cold Six Thousand, which I admit was a very difficult read.
The rest is superb. I approached Blood’s A Rover with trepidation after Cold 6000, but it was brilliant. I’m looking forward to Perfidia later in the year when I can settle down for long reading sessions.
I think it’s worth starting with the Lloyd Hopkins novels. Clandestine is also pretty good and features the (until Perfidia takes us even further back) first appearance of the magnificently malevolent Dudley Smith.
With respect to the OP and “all his novels are pretty much the same aren’t they? Stacccato. Sentences. Tight. Claustrophobic. No fluidity. Little grace.”. You couldn’t be more wrong. They are among some of the complexly plotted novels, not just within the crime genre, but within any fiction. The flow like hot oil. I’m not sure what you mean by no grace, so you might be right, you might be wrong.
One of the very best American novelists currently working. There is no argument.
Interesting take Carl. I would say this. Complex plotting and fluidity are not the same thing. The plots are labyrinthine and, frankly, unfollowable. Either the plots are too dense. Or I am. I happily concede that the latter may be the case.
What do I mean by grace? Firstly, gracefulness. There is no elegance in the prose or the structuring.
Secondly, graciousness. The sense that the human condition is not all appetite and motive as in Ellroy’s world. There is more to examine. Other influences prevail. I would contend.
Thirdly, there is no grace in the sense of “grace” per se. That is, that there is no redemption. Ex-machina or otherwise. It is an unrelentingly masculine world, remorseless and small.
As for the assertion One of the very best American novelists currently working. There is no argument
I am prepared to argue that he is not.
I wouldn’t put him in the top 10 of male living writers who have produced work in the last decade.
That will have to wait.
As noted in the gig thread, I’m off to see Chuck Prophet and leaving about 10 minutes after I post this.
Enjoy the gig. Don’t know his solo stuff but had a couple of Green On Red tapes back in the day. The fact they were tapes tells the story of how long back in the day it was.
Yep , I like him. Especially American Tabloid. I don’t know David Peace but I really see his influence on Ken Bruen’s writing.
I loved what he did twenty years ago – The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential – but that staccato set in with White Jazz and became more extreme, and by The Cold Six Thousand I just found him unreadable. Haven’t bothered with anything since then.